Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

"Is it too late to nominate a candidate for novel of the summer? . . . A paranoid, sarcastic and clattering pop thriller . . . Mr. Shafer gets the playfulness-to-paranoia ratio about exactly right. . . . He's got a sick wit and a high style. Reading his prose is like popping a variant of the red pill in The Matrix: Everything gets a little crisper. . . . Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a page-turner, yet many more "literary" writers will, I suspect, envy Mr. Shafer's tactile prose. His eye is hawklike. . . . Mr. Shafer has written a bright, brash entertainment, one that errs, when it errs at all, on the side of generosity, narrative and otherwise. It tips you, geekily and humanely, through the looking glass."

"Genius techno-­thriller à la Neal ­Stephenson, powered by social-media info-conspiracy à la Dave Eggers."

"Zinging with wit and pop culture savvy . . . Shafer's writing is hip, wickedly hilarious, cutting edge, and ultimately concerned with old-fashioned notions of morality and redemption. . . His inventive, comic, dystopian semi-thriller restored my faith in fiction."

"Smart, funny . . . A techno-thriller with a soul . . . Shafer etches diamond-sharp and precisely observed contemporary satire."

"A unique literary treat . . . As ambitious a fiction debut as you're ever likely to encounter . . . At turns the novel feels like a breakneck spy thriller, until, just around the next corner it morphs into a darkly comedic look at the realities of the human condition in our increasingly technology-fueled world."

"Shafer's savvy, sardonic take on our social media- and Big Data-worshiping society is as current as your Twitter feed..Just in time for your August beach trip, put Whiskey on your Amazon Wish List. As if they don't already know you want it."

"Shafer hits all the right buttons in his debut as he mixes crime fiction, espionage, and SF in a darkly comic novel."

"An edgy, darkly comedic novel whose characters and premise are as up-to-the-minute as an online news feed but as classic as the counterculture rebellions once evoked by Edward Abbey and Ken Kesey...Shafer's arch prose, comedic timing and deft feel for shadowy motives in high places are reminiscent of the late Richard Condon (The Manchurian Candidate), only with sweeter, sweeper characterizations...It's possible that Shafer is remaking the international thriller into something more humane and thus more credible."

"Hilarious, moving, and wildly ambitious, David Shafer's Whiskey Tango Foxtrot reads like a plot against America dreamed up by the NSA and then ghostwritten by Don DeLillo-a love story-cum-international thriller about our surveillance society that's so convincingly paranoid you'll tape over your webcam. Forget debut: it marks the arrival of a major new writer."

"Roaming from Burma to Oregon to a mysterious ship in the open ocean, David Shafer's debut novel is a stylish, absorbing, sharply modern hybrid of techno thriller and psychodrama that bristles with wit and intellect and offers a dark, incisive vision of the global consequences of turning our lives into collectable data. This book will stay with you long after you've finished it."

"Outlandishly clever. Evoking the technological-paranoia of Philip K. Dick and the verbal pyrotechnics of David Foster Wallace, Shafer's digital take-over is absurdly comical and all too familiar. The characters are complicated, fascinating, and fully engaging while the threats feel frighteningly real."

"David Shafer's amazing debut novel should be a controlled substance, its addictive quotient of the highest order. I devoured it imagining this is what a brainstorming event between Thomas Pynchon and Edward Snowden would deliver."

"Hilarious and chilling, fast-paced and thoughtful, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is literary entertainment of the highest order. While the novel reads like a comic thriller, it speaks powerfully to our over-connected, over-watched, privacy-depleted moment. I admire the hell out of it."

"A Graham Greene novel written by Edward Snowden. The Anonymous novel I have been waiting for -- a stiletto thriller of the too-real panopticon digitizing our every breath nowadays."